An Earth Formless and Empty
by Chaotic Serenity
Summary: Eve knows well that desire precedes the sin.


**An Earth Formless and Empty**

For all the years it takes to blossom, and the years of consequence that come to follow, their affair is brief. It happens one day, under boughs laden with ripe and heavy fruits, that Eve kisses the son of God. She tangles her fingers in his hair, presses her tongue past his sly mouth, and breaks laws, breaks bonds, breaks hearts. When he shudders under, into, over her, she knows for the first time the true satisfaction of free will; this garden is His, but she is sweetness and gravity, this Will is hers. When she whispers in his ear that it is so, his eyes are wide, his breath short: in him, she sees the wanting, desire. Not like Adam, carnal and rough - this want is soul deep and catching. She falls into him, and he into her, and together they fall long and hard from grace.

God's love is patient, but it is not kind. Eve feels the sharpness of its edges keenly. Outside the gates, her life is long and full and ugly, her body known under hands she does not love, bearing sons whose sins wear like fetters. She learns to carry these pains as an ox does the yoke: without complaint and without dissent, lest she taste the whip of the master's hand. Eve has betrayed God once. She does not risk it again while she still takes breath.

When she dies, her soul rises, carried on the arm of death's angel, away from birth's pangs and the bones of her children, into heavens as empty and vast and clean as the hidden spaces of her heart. She is a curiosity among God's children, the temptress who failed the satan's test, but they do not question their Father's judgement. The right is not theirs. The last to argue otherwise sits shackled to a throne made of fire and shame, as far from God's love as ever an angel can be. Eve can feel His love all around her. It sits on her soul like the weight of a bloodied stone.

She thinks of Samael often here, though he appears in her mind only in the jumbled abstract, struck from the Word of Heaven. His names now are myriad, whispered with malice and fear alike on men's tongues - Lucifer, Devil, Abaddon, Baphomet - as harsh to the ear as they are to her heart. He is as distant from her love as he is God's, and in this way, Eve comes to understand that her presence here is no mercy. Her son walks the earth endlessly, pitifully, a blight on the face of man, while others rot in a pit of the Devil's making. In the sharpness of Adam's gaze, she feels the blame of their original sin.

The years pass, millennia now. They whittle away at her, hollowing her out like a belly that has never known fullness. Heaven's halls are rife now with the souls of those passed. Once novel, Eve has been relegated to a speck among spatter, the small corner that she inhabits crowded with the good and good enough of the world. Silence is her common companion; when she climbs to the highest spire of the great tower and its looking glass, observing the expanse of the corporeal world below, she goes unnoticed. When the first whispers of Lucifer's desertion of the infernal throne reach Heaven's gate, she is among the first to catch it, a song on the wind carrying the taste of ash and hope.

Amenadiel is dispatched, as he always is, but it is his absence in the years that follow that speaks loudest. In the halls of paradise, the whispers grow louder, less furtive. When Lucifer cuts the world to free Goddess, Heaven trembles. When her son dies by his hand, it shakes. The world is upside down and restlessly inconstant. Samael's defiance ripples through time and heaven, the echo of the voice that asks "Why?", a voice that demands the right to be more than His. In the city of angels, he lives and breathes and stands in spite of God and Father and command, he stands and teeters but does not fall. Heaven cracks along the fault lines at the sight of it. The grasping fist of God's love loosens, space enough to slip through.

Eve watches and waits, waits and watches, feels the slipperiness of time moving through her. Years she has waited here, in isolation and in sorrow, waiting for the gates to open. She has always been a woman of firsts - to exist, to birth, to love, to sin, to fall - but the world is old now, and her heart is filled with the weight of God's silence, His quiet disdain for all her failures. When she stands at the top of the highest tower looking out over the Earth, she does not hear His voice calling. When she leaps, He does not stop her.

The Devil is the first to slip Hell's shackle. Eve falls without fear, determined to be the first that slips Heaven's.


End file.
